I can buy that maybe Checking from Behind isn’t a perfect fit, per the rule:

When a player intentionally turns his body to create contact with his back, no penalty shall be assessed.

However, the onus is on Wilson to deliver a legal body check, and he’s charging far too fast, especially given the proximity to the boards, to adjust to any changes in direction or facing by Schenn.

Wilson faces a phone interview with the DPS, so he won’t be suspended for more than 5 games. And that’s just a shame; this is exactly the kind of play that the NHL should be removing from the game entirely.

One of my guilty pleasures is to follow crazy civil lawsuits. For the last year, I’ve been following the Prenda Saga, where an allegedly sleazy law firm (“Prenda”) allegedly stole someone’s identity to secure porn copyright assignments and then allegedly shake-down improperly-identified random internet users for thousands of dollars to keep their names out of court records. Suffice to say, Federal Courts across the country have not taken their shenanigans lightly.

As Prenda winds down, a new guilty pleasure arrives in the form of Palmer v KlearGear.com. The short version is that Palmer allegedly posted a negative review of KlearGear, so KlearGear allegedly sent a demand letter for $3500 while citing a more-than-a-little-sketchy clause in their Terms of Use that restrain any users from posting negative reviews. KlearGear then trashed Palmer’s credit rating and hired a debt collector to go after them. The kicker?

Apparently, the no-negative-reviews clause wasn’t even in their ToS at the time Palmer used the site.

In addition to declaratory relief, the claims against KlearGear include violations of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, defamation, intentional interference with economic relations, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

KlearGear refused to respond to Palmer’s requests to repair the situation. I don’t see this ending well for them. Public Citizen is on the case.

The NHL has been engaged in a battle against dangerous play for some time now, especially as the danger of repetitive head injuries has come to the forefront of sports consciousness. Brendan Shanahan has been doling out suspensions like candy, and it looks like he’ll be handing out twomore just last night.

There’s a lot of argument about enforcers and fighting, and their role in cracking down on dangerous play. Shawn Thornton has famously opined about “The Code,” almost to the point of considering it to be a touch of chivalry in its own right. Thornton developed a bit of a credibility problem over the course of the last week, though.

Hockey is a beautiful game. Its penchant for bruising hits, its speed, its finesse, make it popular the world over – even where snow isn’t particularly common. The dangerous play we see in the NHL though, isn’t universal; USA Hockey, Hockey Canada, and the International Ice Hockey Federation rules all come down harshly on punitive hits and intimidation. In part due to the Olympic Ethos, there is no fighting in Olympic hockey.

Over the last several years, USA Hockey has instituted a “Standards of Play” initiative. This initiative has a defined goal of removing intimidation from the game, and bring a focus back to skating and stick handling skills. A number of penalties now carry automatic 10-minute Misconduct (or even Game Misconduct) tack-ons because they are always aggressor penalties, showing either a blatant disregard for safety or an attempt to intimidate an opponent.

That does not make it a lesser game, and the NHL needs to follow suit.

After a brief stint in Europe, former Houston Aero Jon DiSalvatore signed with the Syracuse Crunch. Growing up going to games at the Summit during their IHL games, I always had a soft spot for the Aeros even after the advent of my home town Texas Stars here in Austin. The two teams developed quite the rivalry until the Aeros moved to Iowa this year, and DiSalvatore was always right in the thick of it.

In 36 career games against Texas, he has posted 26 points (13 goals, 13 assists), including 6 power play tallies and a game winner. He has been a real Star-killer. While it’s good to see him back in North America, I’m more than a little relieved that he signed in the Eastern Conference; Texas won’t see Syracuse unless both make it to the Calder Cup Finals.

Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration said they are revisiting the safety of chemicals such as triclosan in light of recent studies suggesting the substances can interfere with hormone levels and spur the growth of drug-resistant bacteria.

The former concern is a new one to me; triclosan can affect hormone levels? Yeow.

I think the thing that frustrates me the most about it is: they’ll probably get a thousand applicants. A bunch of 25 year-old kids with a ton of talent and stars in their eyes are going to try to get this crap job for crap pay so they can work somewhere “cool” and feel like a part of something big.

This is a big problem in the industry, and not isolated to Penny Arcade. I turn down unsolicited offers from startups all the time simply because they promise that they’ll make up for the lack of decent pay by providing all sorts of “intangibles” and a great “work-life balance” and so on.

But it’s a big problem at bigger companies, too. Companies like Apple.

Facebook is what I call a passive social network. Your success is always dependent upon waiting to gain page likes and then hoping and praying Facebook will actually show your posts to those who have liked your page.

I have yet to hear a single success story about Facebook marketing, whether through free ‘organic’ impressions or paid ads. I am privy to a lot of Facebook marketing regret, though.

Excellent roundup of git tips for cleaning up your repository. I routinely have to go behind developers (including myself) and amend and rebase commits that include proprietary information not for public release, or users’ passwords that other employees should not have access to.

Coincidentally, there’s a special level of hell reserved for when these are in a repository’s initial commit.

On sunday night I received an email from Amazon saying that they’d detected my Amazon key on one of my repositories. This was a little bit of a surprise, because I’m usually so diligent about not saving credentials into repositories.

Twenty cc2.8xlarge instances for two days came out to nearly $3500 in fraudulent charges.